Easy to implement techniques to create a great “Customer Experience”
Managing “Customer Experience” (CX) is the buzz word today in Information Technology sector. But this blog has nothing to do with leveraging technology to create experience but it is all about some simple strategies to create difference in customer experience for Businesses
One of the easiest ways to create a great experience is to create a false feeling of great experience 🙂 ….May sound abstract but that is what brand managers generally do. One good example is the ad campaigns from Coca Cola with message “Open Happiness”. You would have seen a number of ads featuring Aamir Khan making you feel excited about drinking a bottle of Coke though it is the same good old Coke around for decades. The idea here is to create a fictional effect for the customers by branding it right from customer experience stand point. Ensure you have the CX element as part of your corporate branding strategy
The next option is to create an ambience that touches user’s senses. Something that smells, feels, hears, tastes and looks good. This is a more common strategy adopted by many businesses. When you can get the same coffee for Rs 15, you go to Café Coffee Day and have it for Rs 150 for the reason that the ambience make you feel as if you are having a great coffee. So whatever business you are in, you can create that sort of sensory experience. To give an example a notebook manufacturer can make notebooks that are good to feel, a restaurant can have comfortable furniture for cosy sitting, even your launder man can make a difference in experience by neat handling, no wonder airlines employ great looking ladies as Air Hostess etc. The key is though your core product remains same, you create a customer experience by touching user senses that makes them feel the core product is lot superior to others, though it may not be true 🙂
The other options include creating a community around your product. Though it is a big investment exercise in those days to create community of interest for your products, with advent of Social media like twitter and facebook, it is not that tough today. Volumes written about how Harley- Davidson, created a loyal die-hard fans community and it is now true even in other side of the world. Do a look into the facebook page of Enfield you would really love to own that piece of machine if you go through the postings and interactions in this facebook page of Royal Enfield fans & customers. Ensure you don’t miss our these simple cost-effective community building opportunities even if you are running a small coffee-shop business in your neighboring suburb.
Some of them create an experience by taking you through the way your product is created though it is not an option for many. Best known example is Wine Industry. Though it is quiet famous in Western world, it is picking up fast in India too. Have a look into this web page http://www.heritagewinery.in/winery-tours.html on winery tours organized in Bangalore. May be if you take a cursory walk around your restaurant kitchen showing how the great dishes are made, who knows your customer may love it.
So the bottom-line is though there are always big-ticket investments that you can make to create difference in customer experience by product / service/ technology innovation, you shouldn’t miss our any of these interesting quick to implement options to create a difference “Today” in your business.
Venkatesan Sundaram
Senior Director, CRMIT
Originally Published on Venky’s Blog